Blog

Hello , I am Paul , founder of Waterland Organics. For over 20 years now I have been growing organically in the Cambridgeshire Fens . The journey has been long but has not finished . Hopefully , this blog will give you an insight into what do and the place where we do it ; It's grimness and its equisite beauty

Bon Voyage !!

By pauljonathan, Oct 11 2013 01:36PM

Well , as I look out of my rain lashed window and have my ears assaulted by the sound of the wind howling out of my wood burning stove , I think I can say without fear of contradiction that the best days of summer are behind us . At night, with the farm house surrounded by total darkness, it does not take much imagination to believe you are a ship on the sea ; that is apart from the lack of up and down movement . In fact the whole yearly cycle of providing vegetables for the box scheme does have many nautical themes running through it . Harvesting things in the summer is like short boat trips in the harbour . Produce is picked and immediately delivered .It doesn’t matter if you have run out of stuff as you will soon be tied up again on the quayside and it wont take long to replenish supplies . Whereas the produce harvested now and put in store for winter , is a bit like loading the hold of a ship before taking on a long ocean voyage . You hope there is enough put by to see you to the other side of winter.

As I sat there among the bags of onions and potatoes and bins full of squashes , I could picture in my mind’s eye the slow but perceptible shrinkage in the piles of produce that will occur as we head through the winter and towards the spring . Then we hit the doldrums of the hungry gap when there is a dearth of everything . Scraping by until the weather changes and we reach the land of plenty yet again . So now we have left the shelter of the harbour and are heading once more into the great unknown . This is a time time brace yourselves and pull your oilskins on .